| Summary: | Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have played a critical role in the educational changes that have occurred in the last few decades. The emergence of web applications such as: social networking sites, wikis and discussion forums, created opportunities for online interaction, synchronous and asynchronous communication and potentially collaboration between the students. However, although many of these web applications are used by the students to keep them connected outside school, their potential to support collaboration in an educational context, inside and outside school, has not yet researched in depth. Although collaboration has been reported in many research studies, as the outcome from the use of these web applications, in only a few of those collaboration has been the core subject of the scientific investigation. The study reported in this thesis, investigated whether and how collaboration can be supported between primary students in Greece when using an Online Learning Environment (OLE) to develop jointly a wiki for a school project in the school classroom and from home. For the purposes of this study, an OLE was designed and collaboration between students was investigated by utilising a multiple case study research design that involved having primary students working in groups around a laptop at school. The students used the online tools integrated within the designed OLE i.e., discussion forum, instant messaging and wiki, to address the tasks designed by the teachers and develop a joint wild for a school project. Using a mixed methods approach, qualitative and quantitative data were collected with the use of observation, focus group and questionnaire methods of data collection. Another data source, were the data generated from the OLE (e.g. forum and instant messaging discussions of students in the OLE and students' log files). The findings of this study showed that using the designed OLE at school and from home engaged primary students in working together and participating in face-to-face and online discussions but collaboration was not always supported. In particular it was found that primary students' development of their face-to-face and online discussions after sharing an idea or giving help and feedback differs between collaborative and non-collaborative discussions. Only in certain discussions explaining and/or elaborating and/or commenting and/or justifying occurred, and in those discussions collaborative situations were found
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